Venture Capital Firm Episode 1 Raises New Seed-to-Series A Funding

2 December, 2017

Episode 1 Ventures, a venture capital fundbased out of London UK has just announced the raising of its new seed stage to series A fund. The firm primarily invests its capital in early stage tech startups based in the London region.

The fund was started in 2013 by Adrian Lloyd, Damien Lane, Simon Murdoch and has since made investments in the Enterprise Software as well as Fintech space. It is one of the UK Government's Enterprise Capital Funds, set up to support fund managers who invest in small, high-growth businesses.

The firm has, since a few years, attained the status of a stalwart in the UK, more specifically the London early stage fundingscene with quite a few extremely successful investments such as Carwow, Triptease andAimBrain.

The latest fund raised by the VC is its second since inception. The firm aims to deploy the newly raised capital to lead rounds of £500,000 to £2 million. The total capital that the firm has raised is sixty million GBP or eighty one million USD. This new fund has been raised with the support of the British Business Bank, the U.K. government’s economic development bank.

With the official Brexit date approaching fast, many of the UK based funds are looking towards the British Business Bank for support because of the shutting of the EU fundingtaps. The latest round also saw new partners joining in, such as Draper Esprit and ADV.

The publicly listed venture capital firm Draper Esprit had announced its involvement with the Episode 1 fund as early as October this year. The new fund is said to be sixty percent bigger in capital than the first fund it had raised, and despite the impending perils of Brexit looming on, it was oversubscribed.

In a press statement, Simon Murdoch, founding partner Episode 1 Ventures, overtly emphasizes on the vast troves of experience that the firm entails, which begins with the early stewardship of Amazon UK. This is the key factor that Simon attributes to being the driving factor behind the interest shown in thefund by early stage investors.

This year, the month of June saw the fund make an investment in AimBrain. The startup primarily has operations in the fintech space with its marquee product being the biometrics based fraud detection system.

On the current macro environment in the UK, Simon states that it is extremely hard to get involved in the raising of a fresh fund considering the volatile Brexit negotiations. The exit is apparently causing a lot of issues with startups not being able to hire or recruit the right talent.

He does, however, state that being invested in a bigger company is much more risky and volatile than say an early stage startup. Raising money from a fund of funds is considered to be even harder, to which Simon applauds the interest shown by Draper And ADV.